While a circle of watchers forms, a hundred yards across, they play their flashlights over the Lingam, a tall narrow tower of mud with graceful, curving horns at its tip. At its base, broad steps lead to two wings, platforms supported by ornate sculptured columns; it is all the color and texture of playa mud, as though raised whole from the clay ground with complicated spells. The crowd grows until it is many rows deep -- thousands of people whose glittering costumes catch the light of roving flashlights, half-seen, their growing expectation palpable. Suddenly music roars from a stage somewhere off in the dark, and a double line of banners on tall poles appears through the crowd. A procession enters the huge circle, people in elaborate, mystical costumes move to three massive pyres, lighting each in turn. By the light of the resulting gouts of flame, fifty women, naked, painted, or dressed in spidery costumes cavort into the circle, supplicating, entreating, weaving to the rhythms. They are followed by two long lines of men, also naked and painted, marching, shouting in unison. A character in a costume evoking royalty is led out in a wrought-iron chariot pulled by four men. This is how the Daughters of Ishtar start a show. In the next hour an incomprehensible myth is acted out, in a rock opera with a cast of hundreds. There are more flame dances, strange transformations, and thunderous, hypnotic music. Sitting in the front center, you feel as though you've woken up in the middle of some combination Mad Max/Conan the Barbarian movie; eventually the tower itself is put to the torch and the central players leap into the chaotic fray around it, as flames roar up its chimney throat and burst from its tip. Before the show has finished, the crowd -- maybe by mistake, maybe finally unable to resist the beconing of the dancers -- surges to its feet and inward, engulfing the three blazing bonfires even as it is shrouded by their thick smoke. At the inner edge the dancers and the crowd merge, and the distinction is lost. You dance at the foot of the flame, forty feet from a seventy-foot tower of fire that may fall at any moment, surrounded by whirling bodies and smoke, faces gold and green and black, flame reflected on hands, hair, breasts, muscles, arms, masks, trying to breathe and not breathe both, wonder if you're really in danger and lose yourself in the fantastical magical dance at the same time, live completely for the moment where you are really, truly, here, and somehow also memorize it all, every detail, so you'll never, never forget. You are alive!